ied not long after they fell, and without
any general order to that effect. It was a work that the men's hearts
were in as soon as the fight was over and opportunity offered, to hunt
out their dead companions, to make them a grave in some convenient spot,
and decently composed with their blankets wrapped about them, to cover
them tenderly with earth and mark their resting place. Such burials were
not without as scalding tears as ever fell upon the face of coffined
mortality. The dead of the enemy could not be buried until after the
close of the whole battle. The army was about to move--some of it was
already upon the march, before such burial commenced. Tools, save those
carried by the pioneers, were many miles away with the train, and the
burying parties were required to make all haste in their work, in order
to be ready to move with their regiments. To make long shallow
trenches, to collect the Rebel dead, often hundreds in one place, and to
cover them hastily with a little earth, without name, number, or mark,
save the shallow mound above them--their names of course they did not
know--was the best that could be done. I should have been glad to have
seen more formal burial, even of these men of the rebellion, both
because hostilities should cease with death, and of the respect I have
for them as my brave, though deluded, countrymen. I found fault with
such burial at the time, though I knew that the best was done that could
be under the circumstances; but it may perhaps soften somewhat the
rising feelings upon this subject, of any who may be disposed to share
mine, to remember that under similar circumstances--had the issue of the
battle been reversed--our own dead would have had no burial at all, at
the hands of the enemy, but, stripped of their clothing, their naked
bodies would have been left to rot, and their bones to whiten upon the
top of the ground where they fell. Plenty of such examples of Rebel
magnanimity are not wanting, and one occurred on this field, too. Our
dead that fell into the hands of the enemy on the 1st of July had been
plundered of all their clothing, but they were left unburied until our
own men buried them after the Rebels had retreated at the end of the
battle.

All was bustle and noise in the little town of Gettysburg as I entered
it on my tour of the field. From the afternoon of the 1st to the morning
of the 4th of July, the enemy was in possession. Very many of the
inhabitants had, upon th